The Gift of Love by Rev. Christine Emmerling 2/9/2025

Today I’m speaking on The Gift of Love. Have you ever thought of love as a gift? When I think about love it’s not something that we earn, it is just part of who we are. God being love, and that we are made in the image and likeness of God, means we too are love. Our true nature is love. It is something that we are and don’t have to earn it. Love was given freely to us as a creation of God.

Then we are the gift of love. The gift that keeps on giving. Do people have to earn our love? Not according to God’s love. Is our love conditional? Not according to God’s love. Is our love limited? Not according to God’s love. God’s love is a Principle that means it is eternal. God’s love is the true power of the universe that can overcome anything.

The following is a favorite of mine by Emmet Fox titled “Love”:

1John 4:16 “God is love, and he that abide in love abides in God and God in him.”

“Love is by far the most important thing of all.

It is the Golden Gate of Paradise.

Pray for the understanding of love, and meditate upon it daily.

It casts out fear. It is the fulfilling of the Law.

It covers a multitude of sins. Love is absolutely invincible.

There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer;

no disease that enough love will not heal;

no door that enough love will not open;

no gulf that enough love will not bridge;

no wall that enough love will not throw down;

no sin that enough love will not redeem.

It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble,

how hopeless the outcome, how muddled the tangle,

how great the mistake; a sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.

If only you could love enough, you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.”

There is a key given here as to how people may know the love that they are in truth. That key is, love has to first be realized. First realized then actualized. We have to know who and what we are before we can realize and experience the love that we are. Somehow through the generations of time we forgot where we came from, we forgot who and what we are. Our most precious gift was lost in memory. We are all expressions of love.

The wise ones would tell stories to teach of “the one known by many names” for us it’s God. They taught of God’s love to remind the children who they are. These stories carried into our Bible in the Book of Genesis. The creation story reminds us that God created all including you and me and all life everywhere.

Love is so powerful, but when we let the mental rule the heart then are love is watered down so to speak. We lose sight of what it really is, and we start to use it as a weapon or something that we can withhold and limit. Rather than us letting our heart rule the mental. Then we are allowing ourselves to be a vessel for God’s love to flow through. The greater the flow the more love we realize. We realize the true gift that we already are.

We embody the gift of love, and it is an invisible energy, vibration and frequency. When someone is attuned to love it is felt by others. And when someone has their love shut off that too is felt by others around them. We can only be what is realized within us.

How do we begin to realize this love? Jesus said in Matt. 22:37, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” The first thing to realize is what this God is that we are to love with all our heart, mind and soul.

Let us go back to the beginning to our Divine Science foundation. God has always been and always is - God eternally is.

God is Omnipresent, meaning an all pervasive presence that is everywhere, both invisible and visible, unmanifested and manifested. God is one - the all in all as all. Therefore there is no place where God is not in this entire universe and beyond.

God is Omniscient, meaning Divine Intelligence, the one and only Wisdom, Knowledge, and Understanding. An all knowing intelligence that is everywhere present. This Divine intelligence is accessible to everyone.

God is Omnipotent, meaning the one and only Power that is everywhere present. And this power is all good and is love.

God is Omni-Action, meaning there is only one source of all action and that is of God, the one and only Presence is the only action.

Then each and everyone of us and all creation are of God. It is simple as that. Then it is to realize this same Truth for our self. It is more than hearing or reading this truth, it is more than knowing, it must be realized to the core of our being without a doubt of any kind, and then living it.

We go back to loving God with all our mind, heart and soul. How do we do this? Some are taught to worship a deity. Or, have blind faith in this unknown and impersonal God, or to fear and beg for prayers answered. We in Divine Science follow the teachings of Jesus the Christ. First we are taught that this all loving presence that is like a Father is within us. We are then to know God on a personal level.

How do we develop this personal relationship, but by prayer and meditation. Jesus said to go silently within to our inner holy temple, and close the door to be in communion with the Presence of God within us. Jesus said to pray as though you have already received, being in expectation and gratitude. This attitude opens the mind and heart and sets our vibration to receiving our full measure of good.

We develop our relationship with God within ourselves and then we can truly love ourselves. The next level is to realize this love for one another. To be that gift of love for others. Just by being the love that we are makes us that energy, vibration and frequency we call love. The more we practice unconditional compassionate love the more we become it.

Practicing oneness is the way to true love. I love you as my own self. I love you as I love God. We give up our belief in duality. It’s easier to see oneness when our eyes are closed. But we don’t go around living life with our eyes closed. As soon as we open our eyes we see a whole world separated from us, at least it seems that way.

Seeing this world separated from us is the illusion or false reality. To understand that all we see is a projection from our own consciousness. And how we see it as good or bad or somewhere in between is based on our belief system. To realize all this is from within me. I can change my life experiences by changing my perspective, my beliefs.

We go back to the basic premise of Oneness. The One in the many and the many in the One. I am a living expression of God. I am a vessel of God’s love to live and express through. Every person is a vessel of God’s love to live and express through. To truly realize this same Presence of God is living each and everyone. As I serve my neighbor, I am serving God. To look into our neighbor’s eyes, to their soul of being and see God and see love. This is an act of love and oneness. We are truly connecting our souls in that moment. We no longer see our differences but are united by our common bond in God’s love.

We came here on earth to experience love in a way that can’t be done in what we call the heavens or spirit world. This very life is a gift of love for us to explore, to play, and unfold in even greater degrees. To love is to be whole and holy for we are One - One body of God. An image I use, is a handheld stress release ball that has all these points coming out of it in every direction. God is the entire ball and each of us are one of its points.

We can see ourselves as the point looking outward, not realizing that we are connected to the entire body. As we continue to look outward we feel separated from the whole. Then when we close our eyes, and silently turn inward we remember our connection to the whole. We are so vast and powerful - we are one with it all. It may just be a moment - that is all it takes, a moment, for a new realization of who and what we are in God. It is a gift of love to know God as our very own being, and all life as well.

The following is a real life experience that Margaret Prescott Montague, had published in the Atlantic Monthly, November, 1916; titled “Twenty Minutes of Reality.”

“I was lying on a cot on the porch of a hospital at the time, convalescing after a serious illness. It was an ordinary cloudy March day. I am glad to think that it was. I am glad to remember that there was nothing extraordinary about the weather, nor any unusualness of setting to induce what I saw.

“Yet here, in this everyday setting, and entirely unexpectedly, my eyes were opened, and for the first time in all my life I caught a glimpse of the ecstatic beauty of reality. I cannot now recall whether the revelation came suddenly or gradually; I only remember finding myself in the very midst of those wonderful moments, beholding life for the first time in all its young intoxication of loveliness, in its unspeakable joy, beauty, and importance.

I cannot say exactly what the mysterious change was. I saw no new thing, but I saw all the usual things in a miraculous new light – in what I believe is their true light. I saw for this first time how wildly beautiful and joyous, beyond any words of mine to describe, is the whole of life. Every human being moving across that porch, every sparrow that flew, every branch tossing in the wind, was caught in and was a part of the whole mad ecstasy of loveliness, of joy, of importance, of intoxication of life.

“It was not that for a few keyed-up moments I imagined all existence so beautiful, but that my inner vision was cleared to the truth so that I saw the actual loveliness which is always there, but which we so rarely perceive; and I knew that every man, woman, bird, and tree, every living thing before me, was extravagantly beautiful and extravagantly important. And as I beheld, my heart melted out of me in a rapture of love and delight.

“For those glorified moments I was in love with every living thing before me – the trees in the wind, the little birds flying, the nurses, the interns, the people who came and went. There was nothing that was alive that was not a miracle. Just to be alive was a miracle in itself. My very soul flowed out of me in a great joy.

“For those fleeting lovely moments I did in deed and in truth love my neighbor as myself. Nay more: of myself I was hardly conscious, while with my neighbor in every form, from wind-tossed branches and little sparrows flying, up to human beings, I was madly in love.

“This is how, for me, all fear of eternity has been wiped away. I have found a little taste of bliss, and if Heaven can offer this, no eternity will be too long to enjoy the miracle of existence. But that was not the greatest thing that those twenty minutes revealed, and that did most to end all fear of life everlasting.

“The great thing was the realization that weariness, and boredom, and questions as to the use of it all, belong entirely to unreality. When once we wake to Reality – whether we do so here or have to wait for the next life for it – we shall never be bored, for in Reality there is no such thing.” The End!

I invite you to take a few moments each day to let that love radiate from you to all existence around you. To truly see the beauty and life of God in all creation. You are the gift of love. And so it is.